Tuesday, August 14, 2012

We recently built a SoundCloud-powered community into our own app Tabletop, a modular audio environment for the iPad, using the CocoaSoundCloudAPI. We called this feature CloudSeeder, and users loved being able to browse, stream, favorite, and comment on tracks without ever leaving the app.

As developers, we discovered lots of talented users, and the users found inspiration and a showcase for their creations. The good news for all developers is we're releasing CloudSeeder Devkit as open source on Google Code today.

What does CloudSeeder do?
Let's run through a typical scenario using Tabletop as an example. When you start up an app with CloudSeeder, you'll get an at-a-glance view at the latest happenings in the Headline view: news, the latest track posted, and likes and comments on tracks you uploaded. So now when someone makes a cool new track, everyone who launches the app gets notified immediately in their feed.

Tapping on the Headline will bring you to the CloudSeeder community. The Main view will slide up, showing you News, Featured Tracks, Popular Tracks, Latest Tracks, My Uploads, My Activity, and Following. CloudSeeder filters all the tracks for you (using the "created_with" property, for those of you familiar with the API), so all the tracks and activity you see will be only for the tracks made by your app.

Curating Featured Tracks can be done in the app. When you point CloudSeeder to a user in the config file, all you have to do is like a track as that user and it automatically shows up in the Featured Tracks list! If you're a user, nothing feels better when the app creator features your track.

Integrating CloudSeeder into Your App

If you're ready to poke around CloudSeeder, you can head to the Google Code project. We had fast integration and easy customization in mind when developing CloudSeeder, so the repo contains source code and images for UI (including Retina!) that you can just drop into Xcode. You should be ready to go after adding CocoaSoundCloudAPI, filling out the config header file with a few SoundCloud details, and adding the CloudSeeder resources to your project.

We also added a couple new features to the upload process. If you register for the upload notification, you can add tags, description, and BPM to the track metadata. For example:

CloudSeeder has one more trick up its sleeve to benefit developers: cross promotion. Apps that are a part of CloudSeeder Select get featured across all other CloudSeeder Select apps. When users check out their Featured Tracks list, one track out of that list will be a featured track from another fellow CloudSeeder app. Tapping on that track will show the usual track view, along with a section promoting that app.

A simple email with an icon image and some information on your app will get you in and ready for cross promotion. Find out the details in the documentation.

Get CloudSeeder!

So if you're the proud developer of an iPad audio app, get the devkit from the Google Code project, see CloudSeeder in action with Tabletop, and check out the CloudSeeder SoundCloud group. Thanks!